The Years by Annie Ernaux and Alison L. Strayer

"Available in English for the first time, the latest astonishing, bestselling, and award-winning book by Annie Ernaux. The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present -- even projections into the future -- photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective. On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir "written" by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the "I" for the "we" (or "they", or "one") as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents' generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents' generation (and could be writing of her own book): "From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the "we" and impersonal pronouns.""--

Ernaux sees her past selves as Matryoshka dolls; defined more by their passage through time than places

Feel like I lived in France, I can see why a bunch of stuffy yet maybe sensitive literary critics awarded this the Pulitzer

I read this for the small press book club at my LBS. I didn't have any big expectation going in — I don't follow book awards and wasn't familiar with Ernaux's work. As I started reading, I found the use of we/one etc interesting, and then challenging. I flipped forward in search of chapter breaks — none! On page 102 I wrote a note: “the tense is feeling exhausting.”

I read the last 110 pages or so (ie the second half of the book) in one sitting, just before book club. I really enjoyed the first and final quarters of the book. In the middle, I started to feel a bit of a lull, and as if we were meandering. On finishing the book, the pacing feels intentional. I don't know how much to go into this, but one does feel meandering in the middle of life, so it tracks, anyway.

I thought a lot about my mom while reading, especially as Ernaux is describing her children as they grow into adulthood, and visit her. There's a great moment where she is following her sons and pondering how they could come from her. In another, she's musing about how she is a grandparent, where she still thinks that word is only for her grandparents.

There's a lot more in the book — discussions of class, sex, consumer culture. I might update this review later to think a little about those parts of the book. Overall, though, I enjoyed this. I think I'd enjoy making an attempt to read it in the original French, as well.